Chapter 20: Luke's Side
The squad car smelled of antiseptic wipes and old coffee. Luke kept his eyes on the road, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. In the passenger seat, Scott stared blankly at the passing streetlights, trembling wrapped in a foil emergency blanket Luke had pulled from his trunk. The synthetic material crinkled with every shiver.
Idiot. The word hammered against Luke’s temples in time with the windshield wipers. Sloppy, emotional, stupid.
He’d only meant to silence Ethan. The boy was a complication, a corrupting influence, fetishizing the sacred trauma in that cheap, exploitative way. Luke had watched from the closet, waited for Scott to leave for the funeral, and slipped inside. Ethan’s key under the mat. Pathetic. He’d been in the kitchen, making a protein shake, oblivious.
The take-down was clean. A hand over the mouth, the knife—the real one—sliding into the softness below the rib cage with a wet, giving pressure. Ethan’s eyes had gone wide with a shock so pure it was almost beautiful. Luke had dragged him to the storage closet, taped him up, left him to bleed out quietly in the dark. A tidy end.
Then Scott had come home early.
Luke had heard the car door slam, the key in the lock. He’d frozen, then moved, a shadow retreating to the bedroom to wait for a chance to slip away. But then he saw him. Scott, in that fucking outfit. The grey hoodie, the tiny red shorts. He looked so small. So ready. A trembling offering. The fantasy Scott acted out with that idiot was now, impossibly, real. Luke stood in the darkness, the animal skull mask cool against his face, and felt a hunger so profound it cramped his guts. He couldn’t leave. Not yet.
He’d played his part. He’d let Scott feel the strength, the containment, the danger. And for a moment, it was perfect. Scott’s fearful compliance, the heat of him through the clothes, the way his body went pliant then rigid with confused terror. He’d smelled like laundry soap and nervous sweat. Luke had been hard, achingly so, grinding against that pliant ass, imagining the claiming to come.
Then the little fucker had pushed him. Ethan, dying in a closet, had found the strength to shove Scott right into his arms.
That’s when the red fog descended.
It wasn’t just the interference. It was the affront. This filthy, dying nothing of a man, touching what was his, trying to use Scott as a shield. The carefully maintained control had snapped. He wanted Ethan to know. He wanted Scott to see. The killing wasn’t enough. It had to be a lesson. A display.
The fist, plunging into that open wound. The feel of hot, slippery viscera giving way around his gloved hand. The raw, meaty sound of it. And Scott’s scream—a high, tearing sound of absolute shattered reality. It was the most beautiful and terrible sound Luke had ever heard. It was power. It was godhood.
And then he’d thrown the body. A final, contemptuous gesture.
He’d slipped out the back, over the fence, through three neighboring yards, a ghost. In his car two blocks over, he’d stripped off the blood-smeared outer clothes and gloves, shoving them into a chemical disposal bag. He’d changed into his uniform, always kept neatly in a duffel in the trunk. The mask went into the bag. He’d driven back around, flipping on his lights as he turned onto Scott’s street, the first responder, the hero, again.
Now, the guilt was there, but it was a thin, sour veneer over a seething pit of anger—at himself. He’d shown his hand. He’d let Scott see the beast. The boy was traumatized, yes, but trauma could make people unpredictable. Could make them question.
“He just… threw him,” Scott whispered, his voice raw from screaming. “Like he was nothing.”
“He’s not human, Scott,” Luke said, his own voice a calibrated mix of exhaustion and steel. “What he did to Ethan, what he did to all of them… it’s beyond human. But I won’t let him touch you. You hear me? Not while I’m breathing.”
Scott turned his head, his eyes liquid and lost in the dashboard glow. “Why? Why is he doing this? Why us?”
Because you’re mine, Luke thought. Because the world had its chance to break you and failed, so I had to finish the job. Because you owe me a divine gratitude, and I will collect it. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “But we’re going to stop him. Starting with keeping you safe.”
He pulled into the driveway of a modest, single-story house in a quiet neighborhood. The safe house. His house.
Inside, it was orderly, stark. A place for everything. Police manuals on a shelf, a single framed photo of him graduating the academy, a functional grey sofa. It smelled of lemon polish and gun oil. “Bathroom’s down the hall if you want to clean up,” Luke said, nodding to Scott’s socks, still stained pink. “I’ll get you some clothes.”
Scott stood in the living room, looking adrift. He finally shuffled to the bathroom. Luke went to his bedroom, pulling out an old pair of sweatpants and a department t-shirt. They would swim on Scott’s slight frame. The thought sent a pulse of heat to his groin.
He heard the shower turn on. Good. He needed to think.
The sound of the shower was a steady hiss, but within it, Luke discerned a softer, wretched counterpoint. It was the choked, hitching rhythm of sobs, muffled by the water but unmistakable. Scott was crying in there, broken and alone, and the weight of that knowledge settled in Luke’s gut like a stone.
This was his fault. Every raw, gasping breath was a direct product of his choices. He mentally replayed the moment he’d decided to stay, to touch Scott, to let the fantasy bleed into violent reality. He should have vanished into the night the second he heard Scott’s key in the lock. The self-recrimination was a sharp, cold blade turning inside him. He was the architect of this fresh hell.
Yet, beneath the corrosive guilt, a fiercer heat pulsed. He felt powerful, transcendent. He had eradicated a rival in the most visceral way possible, a primal demonstration of strength Scott had witnessed. The memory of his fist sinking into Ethan’s warmth, the claiming of that life, made his blood sing. He felt like a god who had defended his altar.
The water stopped. Luke exhaled slowly, then stripped off his uniform with clinical efficiency. He pulled on a pair of black boxer briefs and a sleeveless grey tank top, the cotton clinging to the dense muscle of his shoulders and chest. As he turned from the dresser, he saw Scott hovering in the bedroom doorway, a specter in a towel.
Scott’s red-rimmed eyes traveled over him, a flicker of something—awe, fear, hunger—passing through the exhaustion before he jerked his gaze to the floor. The blush that crept up his neck was immediate and telling.
“Clothes,” Luke said, his voice flat, gesturing to the heap on the bed. He didn’t acknowledge the stare.
Scott scurried in, grabbing the sweats and shirt, and retreated. Luke listened to the soft rustle of fabric from the hall. When Scott returned, swamped in the oversized clothes, he looked devastatingly young. “I don’t want to be in the bedroom alone,” Scott said, the admission torn from him. “The quiet… it gets inside my head.”
“You take the bed. I’ll be on the couch,” Luke replied, moving past him into the living room.
“That’s not…” Scott followed, his voice gaining a desperate edge. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to be in a room alone. At all.” He swallowed, looking around the sterile space. “We could… build a fort. Like kids. Pillows and blankets. It feels safer. Enclosed.”
Luke stared at him. “A fort.”
“Forget it.” Scott wrapped his arms around himself. “It’s stupid.”
“Get the cushions from the couch,” Luke heard himself say. He fetched an armload of spare blankets from the hall closet, his movements brisk.
They worked in a wordless, uneven tandem. Luke anchored a thick comforter over the sofa back, creating a low canopy. Scott arranged every pillow in the apartment into a nested wall on the carpet. The result was a dim, fabric-walled cocoon in the middle of the floor, a pathetic bastion against the night. Scott crawled in first, disappearing into the shadows.
His face reappeared at the opening, pale and beseeching. “Will you just lie here? With me? You don’t have to… do anything. Just be on this side of the wall.”
Everything inside Luke ignited. The proximity. The submission. The sheer fucking trust of it. His mind delivered a brutal, explicit cascade: rolling Scott onto his stomach, yanking the sweats down past his thighs, spitting into his hand to slick the way before driving his cock into that tight, untried ass. He wanted to fuck the grief right out of him, to replace the tears with choked moans, to make Scott beg for more until he forgot any other name but Luke’s. The desire was a physical ache, a throbbing demand in his groin.
He said nothing. He just crawled into the confined space, the air immediately thickening with their shared heat and the scent of his own soap on Scott’s skin. They lay on their backs, not touching, the ceiling of their makeshift fort inches from their faces.
Scott’s breathing eventually slowed into the deep, irregular patterns of exhausted sleep. Luke remained awake, every nerve alive, listening to each sigh, each shift of fabric. The hunger coiled in his belly, a patient, possessive thing. He stared into the darkness, and let the boy sleep.